Roth, Louise Marie 1970–

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Roth, Louise Marie 1970–

PERSONAL:

Born 1970; married; children: two sons. Education: McGill University, B.A., 1992; New York University, M.A., 1998; New York University, Ph.D., 2000.

ADDRESSES:

Home—AZ. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Arizona, Tucson, associate professor of sociology.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Research grants from the National Science Foundation, University of Arizona, and Rogers Program on Law in Society.

WRITINGS:

Selling Women Short: Gender Inequality on Wall Street, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2006.

Also author of blog on Huffington Post. Contributor to Workplace/Women's Place: An Anthology, 2nd edition, Roxbury Publishing (Los Angeles, CA), 2002. Contributor to periodicals, including American Sociological Review, Sociological Forum, Sociological Inquiry, Sociological Quarterly, and Sociological Perspectives.

SIDELIGHTS:

Louise Marie Roth is a professor of sociology who specializes in gender issues. One of her particular areas of expertise is sex discrimination in employment. That topic is the basis of her book, Selling Women Short: Gender Inequality on Wall Street. In this volume, Roth explores the issue of inequities in the world of high finance. The book is based on her doctoral thesis, for which she compared the career and salary tracks of seventy-six men and women, with similar qualifications, who began Wall Street careers during the 1990s. Her findings indicate that despite regulations against gender discrimination, the best-paid members of that work force were consistently white, aggressive, heterosexual men. Though women and men may have started out on equal footing, various factors come together to direct female workers into sectors where pay is less, or to clients whose businesses have less funding than those of the more successful brokers—a situation that results in smaller bonuses. Despite official regulations, there is great importance attached to personal relationships between clients and brokers, and sealing these relationships sometimes hinges on activities such as hunting trips and visits to strip clubs—expeditions on which women might well feel uncomfortable and out-of-place. Roth's research indicated that having children also tended to damage a woman's career, even if she continued to work long hours, because she was perceived as less serious and less committed to her job. Reviewing Roth's book for American: A Magazine of Ideas, Laura Vanderkam commented: "The results of her survey are disconcerting for those of us who generally trust the free market to end discrimination." A reviewer for Here Is the City called Selling Women Short "a powerful new indictment of how the very systems put into place to address discrimination have allowed more subtle, but no less insidious, forms of discrimination."